OFFICERS are owed 480,000 rest days across England and Wales \u2013 partly due to resourcing issues as a result of COVID-19.<\/p>\n
Essex Police Federation says the pandemic has meant officers haven\u2019t been able to take breaks as they usually would.<\/p>\n
However, Chair Laura Heggie has urged officers to ensure they get time away from the frontline as best they can.<\/p>\n
She said: \u201cIn Essex, it\u2019s not that officers can\u2019t take a rest day. But COVID has probably changed that a little bit this year, more so than any other time, because we didn\u2019t have as many people off during the summer holidays or the school holidays as we usually would have done because people couldn\u2019t necessarily go away.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s partly why rest days are stockpiling. You might generally be taking a day off to go to the theatre, to go out with friends but that\u2019s not available to people now.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was talking to someone in our resource management department who said one of their roles at the moment is to try to start reducing reduce the number of rest days owed to officers.<\/p>\n
\u201cRegulations say that rest days, when cancelled, should be reallocated to another date within four days of that rest day being cancelled. That doesn\u2019t take into account rest days that build up as a result of public holidays, for instance, and times like that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Laura said that it is vital for officers\u2019 mental and physical wellbeing that they do take a break when they can.<\/p>\n
She said: \u201cRest days, annual leave, are all really, really important for officers to take because that is your downtime.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have conversations about the Regulations quite often around the time where officers are being chased up to reallocate their rest days or start to use some of their rest days.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have these conversations, which is that the rest day doesn\u2019t have to be taken, you don\u2019t have to book it for a certain period. So you can book it for in advance and then move it once you have a commitment that comes nearer, which would then save it being necessarily in the pot.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s important that people still take rest days or leave to spend time with family and get downtime, for their mental health because that is affected by being at work all the time.<\/p>\n
\u201cSometimes we don\u2019t even see that, and it is a case of just needing that time out.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
OFFICERS are owed 480,000 rest days across England and Wales \u2013 partly due to resourcing issues as a result of COVID-19. Essex Police Federation says the pandemic has meant officers\u2026 read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":147089,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147018"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=147018"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147018\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":147160,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147018\/revisions\/147160"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/147089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=147018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=147018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=147018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}